


Even The Bones Would Do

by TextbookEnigmatic



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: AI, AU, Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, M/M, Post-Apocalyptic, Post-Nuclear War, multi-chapter, not scientifically accurate
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-15
Updated: 2014-10-14
Packaged: 2018-02-17 12:04:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2309069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TextbookEnigmatic/pseuds/TextbookEnigmatic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"A week passed, and the rain stopped, and Charles was everything Erik could hold in his cobbled-together heart."</p><p>Or, in which an android with a peculiar past discovers an AI without a memory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Yes Or A No

**Author's Note:**

> In advance: sorry if formatting is funky. I'm working on it.  
> Enjoy!

   

1.

In a better time, the stretched-thin skin of Erik’s hand had touched grass.  Not dry grass, either.  Real, fresh, elastic green grass.  There had been a park, or maybe an open field, stretching lazily into a distant tree line.  A German street sign, bent sideways.  A sun.

He had reached to run a hand over the blades.  To feel across his hollow palm something wholly Earth-made.  It had been a lovely he had trouble describing, cold and cruel and altogether marvelous there against the skin.   

Now, Erik clenches a fist, and a stray wire catches haltingly on his pinky.

He ignores it, and faces before him the empty concrete highway.  It’s nearly sunrise.

The street goes, and goes, and goes, until it vanishes, like a cut string, over the dark horizon.

2.

    “I made you,” growled Shaw, as the shelter’s iron walls shook, and the bookcase collapsed under the weight of the sliding shelves.  “You can’t do this.”

    Erik hadn’t responded.  It was programmed inside him, somewhere.  A minute, blue-red code line on a flash-drive sized memory card.  He was meant to take orders, like Frankenstein’s golden retriever.

    With flint of a smile, he crushed Shaw’s watch first.  Severed the wrist.  Ring second.  Decapitated other hand’s finger.  Then the helmet.  The helmet he usually kept locked under his desk, in a plastic safe he thought clumsily that Erik didn’t know about.  The helmet he had shoved onto his head with a twisted smile, and started up the shelter steps with before Erik had stopped him in his tracks.  

    By the time Shaw had stopped twitching, Erik could feel an unfamiliar surge in his stomach.  All wrapped up in the cold tang of the iron, the gold, the cheap copper edging of the collapsed shelf, a writhing snake of something wonderful in his gut.  Everything was red red red and his mechanical heart thudded electric circuits through his aluminum veins.  

    “I can do anything I want.” Erik stepped over Shaw’s body.  He knelt down, touched a hand to the smooth, unfamiliar metal.  It sang under his fingertips.  He lifted it up, and tucked it under an arm as he stood.  “I can do anything I want now.”

    When he got outside, the Earth smelled like exploding atoms, and everything was still red red red.

3.

    He passed through the field without any real trouble.  That, like mosquitoes and nightmares, came suddenly and irritatingly at twilight.

    Humans.  Four of them.  Tattered, beaten, laced with gore.  From this distance, they stood crooked and heaving just outside the field fence, looking for all the world as if some back country farmer had put them out to shoo away birds.  

    Erik froze, clutching the helmet to his side.  He grit his teeth, and hoped that they couldn’t tell he wasn’t quite like them from this distance.  The night was growing colder, and he could see them sway, shivering.

    “Goddamnit!” one was shouting.  “I can’t take this.  Okay?   I can’t fucking take this anymore.”  

    “Just be quiet, Alex,” another one said, softer than the first.  “Please.”

    “Why?  Everything’s ruined.  We’re going to die.  We’re going to die just like Sean, in some backwater dump, and no one’s gonna bury our sorry asses.  Do you really want that, Darwin?”

    A pause.  Erik froze.  Had they seen him?  But–

    “No.  No.  Just stop, Alex, for God’s sake.  You’re breaking my heart.”

    Alex didn’t speak again.  Neither did Darwin.  An hour passed, and the Erik kept moving, the brush of the wind faint at his back.

4.

And this is how it goes.  

A hungry, warped human.  Carrying daggers, carrying guns.  Lunges at him.  Misses.  Makes it.  Lunges again.

He slices their throat quickly, with no real purpose or feeling.  

Erik keeps moving.   

5.

    Over and over and over.

6.

    Erik keeps moving.

7.

    It was warm and overcast when he came to the first building since the shelter.  Fat, acid raindrops gathered in his hood, his hair, the crook of his collarbone.  Still, Erik shed his coat, wrapping it carefully around the helmet.  The metal thrummed, coursing soothingly through his pinky and his wrist.  

    This building was newer, just barely built before “The Beginning”, as Shaw had called it.   Dirty white columns, green-glass windows nearly all shattered.  He picked his way carefully through the wreckage, and headed for the bent double-doors.  They had somehow remained intact.

    Once inside, the rain sounded much more distant.  Erik squelched forward in his wet boots, and looked around.  He was in what looked like a waiting room, with rows of rusted metal chairs, a ripped couch, a water cooler tipped on it’s side.  The smudged remains of a magazine lay by his feet, and he kicked them away with a curl of disgust.  

    “Well,” he said.  His voice sounded foreign and cold to his ears,  “This won’t do.”

    The next room was smaller, more intact.  It was off a pale hallway, with a workable door, and a bank of what looked like twenty computers against the grimy back wall.  Dust gathered on the screens, and as Erik set the helmet down on the ground, he couldn’t resist dragging a sleeve over his palm to wipe one filthy monitor.  

    With a soft plink the screen blinked on.  Eric jumped back.  Embarrassed, he snatched the helmet back up, and leaned forward.

    There was a little green message on the screen.  It flickered, faded, blinked back to full brightness.  Erik read it slowly, just to be sure.  

    _Would you like to shut down?_  And under that, in twin green boxes: _Yes and No_.  

    Erik looked down at the mouse, attached to the base of the clunky yellowed keyboard by a frayed wire.  He let his hand float over it, then looked back at the screen.

_Would you like to shut down? Yes or No._

    Erik blinked.  The screen wavered, as if it sensed his fingers scraping over the mouse.  

    A minute passed.  But Erik could not do it.  He straightened, the helmet safely under his arm, and backed away from the gently glowing screen.  He made sure the door was firmly closed, backed a chair under the doorknob, and settled down in the farthest corner, where he could just see the computer’s dim light out of the corner of his eye.

    There was almost something comforting about it.  Erik let the strange feeling persuade him into uneasy, electric sleep.

8.

    _Red red red._

A candle.  More of them.  Lined up.  Someone is singing.

_I made you._

    Someone is singing and he can’t hear the words.

_(Would you like to shut down?)_

    The candles are being blown out, one by one by one by–

_You can’t do this._

    Stop.  Please.  He doesn’t want them gone.

_Yes or No._

The song is getting faster, getting darker, getting louder.

_For God’s sake.  You’re breaking my heart._

  He cannot see, cannot feel, cannot move cannot–

9.

    “Hello?”

    Erik jolted awake.

    “Hello?  Is someone out there?  Can you hear me?”

    Jerked to his feet, fists raised.  The room was painted in the soft, uneasy light of dawn, and Erik blinked rust from his eyes.  The computer’s screen was still dimly glowing, and, in a haze, he stumbled towards it.  

    And heard it again.

    “Raven?  Is that you?  Are you alright?  Did they find you, Raven?  Hello?”

    With a shiver, Erik realized the voice was coming from the computer.  It was distant and tinny and very afraid.  He approached slowly, and did not notice he left the helmet back in the corner.  

The message on the screen was still there.  Erik avoided it, and crouched down to level with the computer’s clunky speakers.  One had fallen over, and he righted it without thinking.

“Are you real?”  The voice was louder.  Now that he was right next to it, Erik could hear strains of what might have been an English accent, lost in a faint sludge of static.  

He swallows, the remembers, somewhat distantly, that he does not have a throat.  

“Yes,” he answered, after a moment.  “I am.”

There wass another pause.  Then–

“Are you a Yes or a No?”

“Excuse me?”

“Are.  You,” the voice said, in an obnoxiously slow voice.  “A.  Yes.  Or.  A.  No.”

Erik, despite himself, snorted.  

“I heard you the first time,” he snapped back.  “You just make absolutely no sense.”

“Don’t be rude,” said the voice.  “I’m only being cautious.  They’ve all been shut down by Yes’s.  I don’t want to end up like them.”

Erik didn’t respond right away.

“In case you were wondering,” the voice added.  “I meant the other people.  The other computers.”

Erik backed up again.  For the first time, he glanced at the rest of the bank.  Nineteen black screens.  They’d gone warped and dirty.  Most were missing speakers.  One, near the middle had a small, familiar hole in the screen.

“Are you still there?” The voice sounded like it was trying to hold down panic.  Erik waited a second before answering, still wary.  

“Yes,” he said.  “And no.”

“No what?”

“I’m a No.”

“Oh,” said the voice.  “Well. That’s good.”

“Where the Hell are you?” Erik asked, leaning in close to the screen. He could make out a dull brand name on the side of the clunky computer, but time and something with claws had scratched it into ineligibility.  “And who the hell are you?”

For a long moment, there was nothing but the low hum of the computer, and Erik’s own internal whirring.  

“I-I don’t know.” The voice said, at last.  “I can’t remember.  

Erik found himself re-reading the message on the screen.  He glanced back at the helmet.  It lay half-wrapped in his soiled old coat, waiting for him.  A heavy anchor.  For a brief moment, he saw Shaw’s pale face, his white teeth.  A bar of unopened chocolate, sitting lonely on a mahogany desk.  For a brief moment, he was someone else.  Suddenly, a burst of bright electricity ran hot through him, crackling up his wires and into his brain.  He jerked back, breathing hard.  The skin on his palms was sweaty, and cold.  

There was something very wrong here.  

Without thinking, Erik backpedaled.  He snatched the helmet and his coat from the floor, and hurtled towards the door, yanking the chair out of midair with one fist.  It slammed into the computer bank, toppling over the bullet-hole monitor with a discordant smash.

“What are you doing?  What’s going on?” The voice was raising, not in fear but in anger.  “Where in Hell are you going?”

Erik hurled the chair towards the voice’s monitor.  It missed, and knocked the keyboard clean off.  The letters scattered, plastic ants, across the worn linoleum floor.  Erik yanked the door open, and hurried through.

“Please,” the voice called out.  Erik stopped, one hand balanced on the doorframe.  “Don’t leave.”

The helmet felt uncomfortably heavy in his arms.  He shifted it once, twice.  Shook his head.  Blinked.  

Slammed the door behind him as he went.

10.

    Erik spent the night in the hallway.  He didn’t sleep a wink.  Outside, a fierce wind whipped the ceiling, and the sound of glass snaking across the roof beams echoed in the empty halls.  He cradled the helmet to his chest, it’s peculiar warmth running a length down his arms, up his fingers, into his bones and his wires.  The human part of him wished desperately for the mediocre shelter of the computer room.  The logical part (Shaw, with his drills and his circuit boards) told him there was nothing good in those little black screens.

    But Erik kept staring at the door, and thinking of two green boxes and a strange, foreign voice.  

    Was he a Yes or a No?

    A thunder boom, and rain began to slither, tepid and sour, down the hallway’s dirt-caked window panes.

    Erik waited, and watched his own shadow bend and twist on the wall opposite him.

11.

    “Alright,” he snarled, banging open the door.  “You win.”

    The voice scoffed.

    “Hardly a win.  You threw a chair at me, didn’t you?”

    “I thought you couldn’t see.”

    “I can bloody well hear, you incorrigible idiot.  You nearly killed me.”

    Erik sighed, and dragged the chair upright again.  He pulled it (none too gently) up to the edge of the computer bank, and sat down gingerly, knotting his arms across his chest

    “Fine,” he said.  “I’m sorry.”

    “That’s right,” the voice said, smugly. Then, somewhat awkwardly: “do you have a name, oh great and mighty chair heaver?”

    “Erik.” Erik answered, a little slowly.  He glanced down at his hands, folded neatly in his lap.  “Erik...Lehnsherr.”

    “Lehnsherr?  Is that German?”

    “Polish.  I think.”

    “You don’t know?”

    “It was given to me.”

    “By whom?”

    Erik felt suddenly uncomfortable, as if he were being examined under a large and unknown microscope.  He cleared his throat, straightened, tried to feel intimidating.  

    “And what about you?  Do computers have names?”

    The voice was quiet.

    “I’m not a computer.”  

    Now it was Erik’s turn.  He leaned forward, forgetting, for a moment, that the voice couldn’t see him.

    “Then who are you?” he whispered.

    The voice stopped.  Started again.  Stopped.  

    “I think,” it said, slowly, at last.  “I think I was...I mean I am...Charles.  My name is Charles.”

    Erik thumped back in his chair.   He grinned.  

    “Charles,” he tried, tasting it on the edge of his tongue, the metal casing of his throat.  “It’s nice to meet you, Charles.”

    The voice (he, Erik reminded himself, his name is Charles and he’s not a computer) laughed.  A strange sort of lovely, thought Erik, before he could stop himself.  Like running his hands over wild grass in an empty field.  Like the taste of chocolate.  Like candles lit, one by one, and a song just for him.  

    “It’s nice to meet you, too, Erik Lehnsherr.  It’s nice to meet you, too.”

12.

    A week passed, and the rain stopped, and Charles was everything Erik could hold in his cobbled-together heart.

13.

    The helmet lay where he had left it.  It slowly gathered dust.  It slowly gathered dirt and sawdust bugs under its edges.  

    Erik felt it, pulsing, but pushed its presence to the back of his mind, where Shaw’s razor teeth and taptaptapping fingers gathered their own sort of dust.  

14.

    It was three weeks before everything went wrong. 


	2. Frost and Grass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Someone's coming.

15.

Charles heard them first.  

“Erik,” he hissed, in the dark of the room.  “Erik, someone’s coming.”

From his corner, Erik stiffened, and climbed to his feet.  

“How many?” he hissed back.  

“One–no, two.  I can hear them.  They’re coming this way, Erik.”

Ah, and there was that pit in Erik’s stomach.  He’d felt it before.  Shaw had carved a wandering hole inside him.  Its walls were pathed in a dripping fear.

“Tell me, Charles,” he said, quietly, clenching his fists.  “Can you turn down the volume in there?”

“I can try.  Why?”

Now Erik could hear them, too.  Their footsteps were not the shuffling scuffle of the frightened–they were delicate, fast, searching.  Whispered hushes of their shoes across the ruined linoleum.  He closed his eyes, pictured metal buttons on their jackets, metal rings and metal watches.  It was intoxicating.

“You won’t want to hear this,” he said.  

The door swayed open.  The hole in Erik’s stomach leapt wholly into his throat, and he nearly choked on the weight of it.  

He didn’t have time, however, to dwell.  The intruders had arrived.  

16.

They were neither human, thought Erik, nor the twisted semi-humans of the nuclear age.  He had come across those, spread like some sort of sad science project on Shaw’s hollow floors, hairless, full of burns and hideous, oozing sores.  No, they were different.  They were like him.  He could feel it, a pulsing hum in his wire veins.

“What a lovely surprise,”  said one, feminine and cruel.  “I’d just about thought we were the last.  Isn’t that right, Azazel?”

“Yes, Emma,” said the other.  “What a surprise.”

Erik gritted his teeth.  They were still just shadows.  He reached unconsciously to the computer, running a worn finger over the smooth bulge of the screen.  The light of it glinted, flickered, faded.  Charles was silent.

“Leave.” Erik growled.  “Now.”

The woman stepped forward out of the doorway.  In the pale, watery light, she looked nearly human–blonde hair (ragged, and matted), a tired, faded face.  But Erik, his own artificial insides churning, made note of how strange her eyes were.  How sharp, how angular.  The base of her neck.  One arm, and half of her right leg.  She was part something horrible.

“I remember you,” he gasped, before he could stop himself.  “The bunker.  The experiments.  He called you–”

“Frost,” the woman snarled.  “Now get out of my way.”

She lunged forward, and Erik barely had time to jerk out of the way before she was upon him.  Now, he could see it clearly–she was part dirty glass, or perhaps diamond.  He could see organs, tendons, muscles straining against her, like some unnatural zoo exhibit.  She made a move for his neck.  He ducked, and swung a metal fist blindly towards her knees.

She toppled, swearing.  

Then the second intruder entered. 

“Azazel,” Emma Frost hissed, climbing shakily to her feet,  clumped blonde hair clinging to a cheek.  “Kill him.”

All Erik had time to see was a streak of red, of too-white teeth, and then he was flying.  With a crack, and a blinding flash, his head hit the wall opposite the computer bank.   The distant hum of his internal systems suddenly spiked, and his ear filled with a terrible screeching whine.  An image flashed once, twice through his head.  A drill.  Shaw.  The ceiling of the bunker, gone grey and green with unnoticed mold.  

And then–

“No!”

Emma Frost was standing, lopsided, in front of Charles’ monitor.  In the pale green glow, her skin took on a deathly look.  A shade, or a ghost, or a undisturbed puddle in a basement.  She turned once, to raise the edge of her bruised lip at Erik.

“For the children of the atom,” she said.

And she slammed a diamond fist into the computer.

17.

It was black, for a moment. 

Little white lights.

Voices.  What do they say?  

Nothing, nothing. Erik doesn’t care.

All he sees is 

 

redredredredredredredredredredredredredredredredred–

18.

He opened his eyes.  Blinked, once.  The room was quiet, filled with a foreign darkness.  Outside, he thought he heard rain, or maybe wind, scraping across the shattered roof beams.  But here, it was quiet.

He kneaded a hand across his eye.  It came away warm and sticky, and he rubbed irritably again with a sleeve.

It was not until he brought the sleeve back, drenched, that he realized he was standing.

“Oh,” he said.  “Oh, God.”

Beside him, Emma Frost’s body was twisted.  Her legs stuck out, her arms unnaturally angled towards the door.  A sheet of filthy hair covered most of her face, but Erik could make out the arch of an eyebrow, the jagged, pink edge of an eyelid.  

“God,” he said again. ”Oh, God,”

The other, Azazel, was across the room in a heap.  He did not dare check whether he was breathing or not.  Instead, he wobbled over to the computer bank, the dripdrip of  thatstuff off his arm a soft metronome in his head.

The computer was ruined.  

She’d ripped wires, circuit boards, number keys.  A sharp dusting of glass littered the desk.  The mouse was torn in two.  

“No. No, no, no,” Erik was shouting now, hands scrabbling across his face, across the wrecked computer.  “Charles?  Charles, can you hear me?”

Silence.  The metronome, dripdripdrip.  Erik could not see straight.  He reached out a shaking hand to touch the hole where the screen had been, and an uncomfortable, unfamiliar cold stirred in his gut.

“Charles,” he said, louder than he intended.  “Charles, wake up, you stupid goddamned–”

“Erik?”

From somewhere below the desk.  Muffled, frightened.  Far too tinny.  

“Erik, please, get me out of here,”

He ducked under the desk, eyes adjusting far too slowly to the dark.  There!  A small off-white box.   Six buttons on it’s front, and a strange, circular opening.   

“She only destroyed the screen,” Erik muttered, running a hand over the front of the box.  His knees were getting cold, wet with Emma Frost’s blood.  He wiped them distractedly with his other hand.  “She didn’t know.”

“It’s so  empty  here,” Charles was growing fainter.  “ Please .  Get me out.  Oh, God, get me out–”

“How?”  Erik shouted desperately.  “How?”  

Charles didn’t respond.

“Charles?  Charles!  How do I–”

He realized, with a detached sort of sadness, that his wrist had popped open.  There was no blood.  Instead, there was a gathering of wires, like earthworms, lifted from the dirt of his arm.  

“Oh,” he said.  

Without another thought, he jerked a red wire from his skin, and jammed it into opening.  

For the second time that day, everything went black.

19.

He woke up on a lawn.  This in itself wasn’t altogether strange–he’d been in cities before, been in suburbs, long since destroyed.  He had seen lawns.

No, this was different.   Why?   He blinked, bright sunlight filtering far too fast into his eyes.   Why?

Ah.  That was it.  Blades of grass, brushing softly across the pads of his fingertips, still damp with dew.  This wasn’t real.  This was untouched.  This was  alive.

Erik sat up, a little too quick.  As soon as the white spots cleared from his sight, he stared down at the lawn, then back up at the sky.  Emerald.  Ocean.  Emerald.  Ocean.  It had been decades since he’d even  seen color that vibrant.  He’d almost forgotten they’d existed.  

“Where…” Erik climbed to his feet, squinting terribly in the yellow sunlight.  He was indeed on a lawn, though it was much larger than any dystopic suburb square he’d ever seen. It stretched, lazily, for what he calculated as about a mile, until it reached the sturdy base of a shrub.  Several shrubs, in fact, an a cast iron gate that looked like it had never rusted since it was installed.  

And just beyond the gate (what a sight, what a strange and lovely sight), a mansion.  A real, turrets-and-walkway mansion, made of smooth brown stone.  Erik had to crane his neck to see the full front, mouth hanging open.  

“Where in  Hell, ” he said.  “Am I?”

“Well, for starters, you’re trespassing.”

Erik jumped, and spun.  

There was another man on the lawn.  He wore the kind of expensive sweater Shaw might’ve owned, before the war, before the world ended, and a mildly amused expression.  

“I’m sorry?” Erik took a step forward.  There was something off about the man.  Something curious in his blue eyes, his unfamiliar face.  

“I said, you’re trespassing.  This is private property.  I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Erik blinked.  

And then it hit him.  

“Charles?” He managed, his throat suddenly quite dry.

The man frowned.

“Yeah,” he said, slowly.  “And who the hell are you?”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Next update is next week.  
> -TextbookEnigmatic


	3. The Hallway

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik finds Charles in the strangest of memories.

20.

How strange, this not-Charles.

21.

This unfamiliar Charles continued to frown.

“Look,” he said.  “I’m awfully sorry, but this is private property.  You’re really going to have to leave.”  He was holding what looked like a radio, a walkie-talkie, and he brought it a dangerous half-inch closer to his face.  

“Wait,” Erik raised a hand cautiously.  “Where are we?”

Charles blinked.  

“Where?” He gave a faint smile.  “New York.  What cigarettes are you smoking?”

The air around Erik suddenly grew hot, and he pulled the collar of his shirt, sweat pooling in his collarbone.  He remembered, distantly, a faded laminate map taped to the bunker wall, where Shaw pressed little red pins after he made someone new.  New York.  Far right.  A yellow splotch on an unnamed continent.  All he knew was that it was long destroyed.  

“Impossible,” he whispered.  

“Acid,” Charles answered, the walkie-talkie now up to his ear.  “Really bad acid.  Hey Logan, I’m gonna need you to–”

He froze, eyes wide, as Erik plucked the walkie-talkie out of mid-air by it’s flimsy metal antennae and crushed it without touching it.

“Oh,” he said, after a moment.  “You’re one of us.”

22.

There was no convincing him.  Erik tried desperately to catch up to the not-Charles as he sped off across the manicured lawn, talking the speed of light plus two.  

“Look,” he shouted, as Charles pushed another rusted gate open, this one sculpted out of what looked like tiny, ornate X’s.  “This isn’t New York.”

“I told Hank!  I told him, “Hank, chap, we can’t be all there is.  Genetic history suggests mutation is the ultimate evolutionary step,” he waved his vaguely, and straightened his crumpled sweater without looking back at Erik.  “Humans evolved from their lesser kin, so shall we, the mutants, evolve from humankind.  It makes perfect sense!”

They passed through a smaller yard, this one full of thick, neatly trimmed hedges.  The gravel walk crunched pleasantly beneath Erik’s tired feet, and the smell of leaves and dew and motor oil filled his starched senses like a bullet to the heart.  He stopped in his tracks.

“Charles,” he shouted.  Before him, Charles froze, and turned to smile back at him.

“What is it?” 

Erik looked back at the not-Charles, the completely alive, three-dimensional person in front of him, speaking in the voice of a lonely new friend.  He hadn’t noticed the way sunlight filtered, scarlet and lemon, through Charles’ hair.  He hadn’t noticed the pale freckles, or the crooked smile.  He wondered, for a moment, what he himself looked like (if he had ever looked like anything at all).  

“Nothing,” he managed, voice dry and rusty in his throat.  “Nothing.”

They carried on.

23.

The mirage made a mansion.  Charles pushed open the heavy wooden doors, intricate and shining with obvious daily care.   He shouldered his way past a pair of metal detectors, and turned back to Erik expectantly, arms crossed.  

“Well?” the not-Charles said.  “Aren’t you coming?”

24.

Past framed pictures of people Erik didn’t recognize–a boy in a pair of thick red goggles, a dark-skinned girl with a halo of starched white hair and rain, a woman with her back turned to the camera, a sheath of red hair blocking her face.  Past a closed door, another, an open room with empty overturned desks and a dusty blackboard.  

The mansion seemed to never end.  Erik’s legs grew heavier and heavier, as Charles led him twisting through hallways that all looked the same.  Dark-paneled and hollow.  Abandoned.  Growing colder.  

“Logan?  Raven?”  Charles called.  “Raven, if you’ve been playing pranks 

again, I’ll be cross.  Crosser than before.  I’ll take away the television, if I must!” 

They carried on.  The rooms grew strangely darker, and what little sunlight that had streamed in through shuttered windows before now was dull and silvery.  Erik’s eyes strained to see.  They passed the same pictures, the same locked doors, the same empty classrooms and blackboards.  

“Charles,” he tried.  “Charles, there’s nobody here.”  

At the end of the hallway, Charles finally stopped.  There was a dirty square of light on his back, from an open window.  The sunny, cloudless blue had disappeared from the sky, replaced by a cold, slate grey, and a gathering of bruised purple rainclouds.  The air was thick, and a wind bustled through the hallway, lifting Charles’ bangs, and the hair on the back of Erik’s neck.

“No,” Charles said, softly, without turning around.  “No, this isn’t right.”

And Erik could feel it now.  It coursed, electric, down his wires, his human spine and his metal bones.  The mansion was shaking.  The lawn, through the window, had dried.   The pictures on the wall were mutilated, frames cracked and faces torn wicked from the page.  The woman with red hair’s image lay, crumpled, against the wooden baseboard of the wall.  

Charles turned slowly to face Erik, but he didn’t  look  at Erik.  He didn’t  see  him.  His eyes, pale and lucid as cheap glass, focused somewhere distant over Erik’s shoulder.  

“What is this place?” Erik was shouting now, his voice sounding far too loud and artificial in the tepid silence that filled the hall.  “Where the  hell are we, Charles?”

But Charles did not seem to notice him at all.  He was shuffling forward, the kind of slow march that Erik had only ever seen in the nearly dead or the grieving, huddled monsters in Shaw’s basement.  A death march.  

“They’re here,” Charles muttered, passing Erik without even brushing his shoulder.  “They’ve come.”  

“Charles, it isn’t real,” Erik reached out to grab his shoulder, to touch his hand,  something , but his palm slid through Charles’ with a lick of static.  A green spark.   Would you like to shut down ?  Flicker.  “Charles!”

And he saw it–down the hallway where Charles marched.  It was ruined now, nothing like the paradisal mirage he’d first woke up in.  Chunks of wooden wall panels littered the ground.  A broken pearl necklace, a shattered mirror.  Someone’s discarded baseball bat.  And there, at the end of the hall–a girl.

And there was no heartbreak, Erik though, no needle, no vice-like grip of rubber gloves and antiseptic like the sound that came from Charles.  

“Raven,” he choked, hands floating to scratch grooves along his own jaw.  “Raven, God, no.  Please.”

The girl was scaled, blue, and the same vague age as Charles.  Slicked orange hair, and slit yellow eyes the likes of which Erik had never seen before, not even in the bunker’s twisted mess.  She stood, shaking, a moment.  Raised a quivering hand forward.  Her mouth, dark and small, opened a fraction.  

When she fell, there was no noise.  That dreadful silence filled Erik’s lungs, and he could not breath, could not feel the blood and bolts beneath his weathered old skin.  He gasped and choked, and watched Charles catch the strange woman’s limp body in his arms.    




Static.   Would you like to shut down?  The hallway was wretched with that silence.  

26.

Charles, bent over the strange girl, unmoving.

Yes or no?

27.

From the nearest door, a shadow came.  Erik knew who it was before he looked, before that first bright smile.  

Shaw looked over the scene.  Charles, and Raven, knelt bent and heaving among the mansion’s lonely flotsam.  The storm outside raged dully against the roof, and Erik could hear it’s distant pounding like a church bell in his skull.  

“Curious,” said Shaw, to Emma Frost, who stood by his shoulder in an incy shroud.  “A shape-shifter and a telepath.”

She made no expression.  Charles clutched Raven’s face, fingernails digging white into her dark skin.  

“Dangerous,” Frost said at last.  She kicked a broken coffee mug with a diamond toe.  “A threat and a security risk.”

Shaw sighed, a scrubbed a hand over his hair.  He was wearing the same vinyl gloves Erik had seen hanging, strange decorations, from the bunker walls.  

“Alright, then,” he sighed.  “Freeze them.”  

“No!” Erik shouted, but he found he could not move.  His feet, aching, were fused to the floor.  “No!  Charles, run!”

Frost reached for Raven, her fingertips glinting.  The storm howled, and rain slammed through the nearest window, shattering it to barely flickering pieces of glass.  They fizzed out in a heave of static before the met the floor.  

Just then, an ear-splitting whine pierced the air.  Frost, taken aback, stumbled to her knees, clutching her ears.  Shaw blasted backwards, scrambling towards the room he’d come from, and Erik swayed where he was fixed, the sound echoing through his head in a brick fall of sharp pain.  

Charles was no longer kneeling.  He stood, back to Erik, with both hands pressing into his temples.  

And Erik knew–he knew the sound, knew it’s shrieking words.  

RAVENravenRAVENRAVENnonoNOnoRAVENPLEASEleaveusaloneALLGONEravenRAVENRAVEN

They were coming from Charles’ head.  

Shaw was on his knees, clutching something shined and shaking to his chest.  Trying to drag it upwards.  Erik watched, horrified, as sweat and dark blood poured, thick slugs, from his ears.  Charles’ voice grew louder, and Emma’s twisted form began to splinter and crack besides Raven.  

RAVENRAVENRAVENnoNoravenravenloganhankRAVENmoiraRAVENseanangelRAVENnoNO (and there in the center, like a sore) WEAREN’TALONEpleaseRAVENno–

and it stopped.  

Shaw, collapsed on the floor, had managed to bring the object to his head.  Erik recognized it with a dull slide of gears, a drop of his heart straight into the metal tub of his stomach with a cold fear.

The helmet.  

“I’m afraid that won’t work on me, Mr. Xavier.”

28.

For a brief moment, before he flickered and collapsed in a shower of green sparks, Erik could have sworn Charles looked back at him.

29.

Could’ve sworn he saw a dark bead of recognition in all that hopeless blue.

30.

And then there was nothing at all.

31.

He woke up alone, spread underneath the computer bank’s beaten table like a mangy dog.  His wrist ached.  A thin red trail of wire and blood led towards off-white box.   Behind him, Emma Frost lay in pieces.  Above him, the pale green of the computer shuddered, died.  

He rose slowly, head ringing.  

There was no sound but his creaking bones, and he dragged the wire from the box as carefully as he could manage.  Stumbled to his feet.  

Then–

“Erik?”

(He felt the strangest warmth in his heart, beating suddenly twice the speed of his pumping electric veins. )

“Erik?  Is that you?”  A familiar, tinny, computer-bound voice, infinitely small in the dingy abandoned room.

“Yes,” Erik breathed.  “Yes, I’m here.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter coming up!   
> Thanks for reading,  
> TextbookEnigmatic


	4. Going Down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's something in the basement.

32.

They stayed awhile.  There was new chasm between them, dark, and filled with uneasy memories, but they stayed awhile all the same.

“How,” Erik wanted to ask, and “why”.  Why was Shaw in Charles’ mind, how was Charles here now.  Where was Raven, that beautiful scaled woman, unmoving on a wooden floor.  

“I remember,” was all Charles could say.  His voice was growing more distant, scratchier with each passing hour.  “All of it.  I remember.”

Erik leaned back against the wall.  He had moved the bodies–he was tired of staring into Emma Frost’s diamond eyes.  

“You were a telepath,” he said, hesitantly, stretching a hand to flick debris from the table’s edge.  

“There were so few of us,” Charles replied.  “Raven and I, we wanted to protect them.  The children.  Give them a home.  And then the bombs fell, and then they started leaving.  One by one.”

(Erik, feeling cold, wondered how it was like to have a past.  He saw the bunker’s sturdy walls, Shaw’s red-stained white shoes, the ruined fields he walked miles in, helmet tugging at his side.)

“And then he came,” he filled in.  “Shaw.  The Creator.”

“The Destructor,” Charles answered.  “He took the mansion first.  The children.  Logan, he chopped into pieces like a ragdoll.  Buried him in the back garden.”  He faltered here, and the computer box sparked.  “He cut off Angel’s wings because she refused to join him.  And Kitty–well, she was just a child.  Small.  I didn’t see what he did to her.  What he did to the others.  Scott, Ororo–I don’t remember their faces.  I don’t remember their deaths.”

(There was a white room, in the bunker.  Shaw kept his Creations there.  It was where Erik was born, it was where the others died.  Another death chamber, not so different from the ones above the Earth’s ruined crust.)

“He didn’t kill Raven, though,” Charles was still speaking.  Faster now, more confident.  “She got away.  She was always the smartest one.  The best one.  I loved her, Erik.  She was my everything.”

(A curious cold, now.  Starting in his gut.  Erik wanted suddenly for Charles to be corporeal, for his hands to be flesh and his voice to be real. He wanted to tell him something foreign and excitingly new.)

“What happened to you?” He said, instead.  “What did Shaw do?”

Charles did not answer right away.  Erik feared for a moment that the computer had died.   Would you like to shut down?

“I’m not alive, Erik,” he said.  “I died, back there.  At the mansion.  I’m not alive.”

Neither am I,  thought Erik.  

Perhaps he never was.

 




They spent another week in the room.  Charles growing distant, growing empty, growing silent.  Erik, his weathered skin nearly all torn from his hands.  The helmet still hadn’t moved.  It held a strange darkness now, different from the diluted red that died it’s metal covering.  Erik saw it in Charles’ memories, and it frightened him.   Fear, like a rat in an empty basement, starting to scurry over and over in his tired mind.  

So he listened.  Asked him questions.  Made him repeat, over and over, what his life had been like.

The color of his bedroom walls.

The way Raven looked, beaming, the day she graduated high school.    

The roses climbing patterns over the mansion walls.

His favorite book, his favorite food, his favorite whiskey glass, from his mother’s dusty collection in the kitchen cupboard.

Erik listened, and ignored the monster struggling in his chest.  

 

34.

Charles told him he was going to shut down by the end of the week.

Erik, nodding, told him nothing at all.

35.

The room grew colder–the weather had not improved.  Instead, rain turned to sleet, which turned to acidic, dun-colored snow.  It gathered in tepid piles in the corners, and Erik slowly moved his things to the center of the room.  He did not dare sleep.  Instead, he stared at the open plug left in Charles’ computer box, and waited.

 

36.

“Erik”, he said.  “You have to understand.  I’m losing power.” 

“I’ll find you a power source.”

“Where?  There’s nothing here.  Shaw made sure of it.”

Erik looked around the room, wildly, for a moment.  He was suddenly filled with a curious rage.  Shaw, the Creator (his Creator), had destroyed Charles long before Erik first set foot on the ravaged Earth.  Why, then, should Erik not take his secondary revenge?  He was, after all, Frankenstein’s monster, unnervingly and insubordinately conscious and vicious all at once.  He could ruin Shaw’s last great victory.  He could save Charles, somehow.  

“Then we’ll find one,” he said, gathering himself to his feet.  “We’ll find you a power source.

“I’m sorry, my friend,” Charles replied shakily.  “It’s just not possible.”

“Some optimist you are.”

“That’s not pessimism,” a cold pause.  “That’s just the truth.”

Erik paced, his feet worn through.  Time had begun to tear the human pieces from him.  He ran a hand, hard and anxious, through his hair (which had never once grown).  There had to be a solution.  Deus ex machina, a saving grace, a benevolent wish of God.  There had to be.  He eyed the helmet, still wrapped in his jacket, and felt the worm of desperation in his gut begin to burrow.  

A slight of snow drifted through a hole in the roof, and Erik, distracted, caught it.  

It hit him.

“Freeze,” he said, slowly.  He picked at a hole in his jacket sleeve.  “When Shaw raided your school, what did he say to Emma Frost?  Before...before he killed you.”

“‘Freeze them’,” Charles answered.  He laughed, short and wicked.  “Oh, Erik, you clever bastard.  Of course.  He froze me.  He froze us all.”

“That means you’re here somewhere.  The real you.”

“The real me,” Charles laughed again, this time loud.  Even static-filled and wiry, it sent a spark of shocking joy through Erik’s spine.  “Erik, if you can transplant my conscious into my actual mind, there’s a chance I can live again.”

37.

They had to be careful–one slip, and the computer box would surely break, and with it, Charles’ conscious.  Erik lifted it slowly without touching it, relishing the surge of magnetism, cool and coppery, through his fingertips.  

Out the door they went.  Out, past Emma Frost’s huddled shape (Erik was glad Charles could not see her now, no matter their past).  Past the hallway of locked doors, and into the waiting room.  This time, Erik closed his eyes.  If he concentrated, he could feel the vibrating pulse of the magnetic field, beating like a magnificent creature’s heart in the basement of the destroyed laboratory.   

“Down here,” he said, letting Charles’ computer rest briefly on a dusty countertop.  They had come to a locked door.  He reached forward, and yanked the rusted lock from the doorknob.  

“A basement?” Charles’ asked.  He sounded tired.

“A freezer,” said Erik back, not entirely joking.  As soon as he crossed the threshold, the temperature dropped ten degrees.  His skin prickled, and he shivered on instinct.  

The staircase just inside the door led crookedly downwards.  Time had ripped metal boards, like flakes, from the steps, and Erik dared not think what lay beneath the broken slats.  The railing was rusted, and crumbling.  He smelled something cold and scientific–the scent made his hair stand up, memories of the bunker swelling uncomfortably in his head.

His only memories, he noted, before allowing his concentration to rest fully on the computer box and the staircase.

“Am I...am I really in this building?” Charles asked, just as Erik put a first tentative step on the dark stair.  

“Yes,” said Erik, although he had no way of knowing who (or what) was down in that turgid darkness.  “Yes, you are.”

 

38.

 

They descended slowly.  The staircase, unused to human weight, buckled and swayed.  Erik felt the magnetic pull of each step weigh like a comfortable anchor at the back of his head.  He watched the computer box, levitating stiffly, and continued down.  

“Where do you come from?” Charles asked just as they reached the final stair.  The ground was not sleek metal, nor was it the smooth, dark concrete Erik had grown used to in the bunker.  Instead, it was loose, ancient dirt.  The sound of it irritated Erik–the sudden loss of metal beneath his heels made him shudder, and blink.  

“What do you mean?” he replied, pushing forward into the dimly lit room.  He could only just make out the walls.  They were panelled, older than the ones upstairs, and lined with empty, crooked shelves.  A hallway, Erik thought.  Another goddamned hallway.  Something down that increasingly cold hallway, though, he reminded himself, could save Charles’ life.  He pushed on.

“I mean, where were you born?  Normally, I’d check your head myself, but well,” Charles let out a half-hearted chuckle.  “That’s a bit of an issue now.”

Erik thought miserably of Shaw.  Of Emma Frost, in bits and pieces, coming to life on a cool steel table.  He thought of himself, suddenly existing in a tiny concrete box, surrounded by the gutted strangers he’d been plucked and put together from.  

“I wasn’t.” 

“Wasn’t what?”

They came to the first set of heavy, iron doors.  There was nothing inside but a bent armchair, and a stack of antique texts.  They moved on.  

“Born.  I was not born.  I was made.”

The second door.  A child-sized bed, and a set of decaying wooden blocks.  Near them, a fish tank lay shattered and abandoned, the fake reeds scattered across the dark floor.  Erik dared not think who might have lived there.  

“Who made you, my friend?” Charles sounded soft, careful. Even without telepathy.  

Erik did not answer for quite some time.  He peeled open the next door (a strange room, covered in red reflective glass, broken), and the next (a room covered in scorch marks, lightning strikes inexplicably indoors).  The next.  A broken table, the last rotted remains of someone’s stuffed toy.  A room made of padded walls, burned speed marks covering the cushioned sides.  

“Erik?” Charles was starting to sound smaller, more filled with static.  Magneto felt the computer box, a coppery weight in his head.  He stretched a hand out, to steady it in mid-air.

“Don’t talk, Charles,” Erik said, colder than he intended.  “I think we are getting closer.”

They had come to a bend in the long hallway.  Now, the temperature was freezing, crackling ice crawling up the panelled walls.  There were no more prison-type doors now.  No abandoned lives in iron.  Somehow, this was worse.  Erik moved on.  

The computer box let out a spark, once or twice.  A dull whining.  The cold was cracking it’s musty beige casing.  Erik moved faster, his feet slipping on the dust floor.  He could feel something, writhing and twisting, just feet away.  

(Inches, now, inches).

(Inside the computer box, Charles was disappearing).

(And now Erik desperately wanted him to talk, wanted him to listen).

“Shaw made me,” he said, just as they reached the end of the hallway, the pale light finally flickering into a blinding fluorescence as Erik found the light switch.  “He stitched me up from the mutants he killed.  He wanted a war machine.  Something that would reshape the world, even after he destroyed it.”

“Shaw destroy the world,” Charles said, quietly, from somewhere in the back of the box.  “The humans did.  Bombs.  It was just another nuclear war.  It didn’t even have anything to do with mutants.”

Erik didn’t know whether to feel betrayed or not.  A curious sensation swept his bones.  Shaw had not caused his “Beginning”, his storm of ages, his desperate recreation go Noah’s Ark.  He had simply survived it.  

“I guess,” Erik said, slowly.  “I guess I am simply Frankenstein’s monster.”

“Oh no, my friend,” said Charles. Erik could barely hear him, the whirring growing clunkier and angrier.  “You are much more than that.”

Erik threw open the last door.  

“We’re here,” he breathed.  “Charles, we made it.”

Charles did not reply.

 

39.

 

For an instant, Erik could do nothing but stare.  

The room was small, empty save for three oblong containers, rested neatly in the center of the floor.  They looked, to Erik, like discarded spaceships left by some forgotten visitor.  Made of smooth, unfamiliar metal that surged like venom in his wire veins.  Each one had a small window, frosted over and carefully preserved.  

“Charles, how do I do this?” Erik set the box down on the floor near the containers.  He reached forward to brush a hand against the middle one.  Inscribed there, under the lip of the window, was a series of familiar letters.

XAVIER, CHARLES

And then, slightly smaller, in red:

TELEPATH.  

“Charles?”  

The container beside it had a shakier, name, as if the writer had been unsure of their knowledge of the within.  ???, LOGAN.  POWERS UNKNOWN.  

“Do I plug you in somewhere?”

The final container, on Charles’ left.  Erik knew what this one (empty) said before he saw it.   DARKHOLME, RAVEN.  SHAPESHIFTER.  

“Charles?”

Erik became suddenly aware of the silence.  He knelt quickly down, grabbing the computer box with both hands.  It had stopped whirring, cold to the touch.  He shook it, once. Then twice, much harder, panic building in his throat like sour bile.

“No,” he shouted.  “No, no, no!   Damnit, Charles! Answer me!”

Silence.  

Erik stumbled backwards.  His feet felt suddenly numb.  His hands, cold and crooked by his side.  

(He remembered, suddenly and uncomfortably, a line of green text across a bright screen.   Would you like to shut down?  Yes or No. )

“No,” his hissed.  “ No! ” He shouted.  

The computer started to shake.   Erik let it go, his hands now raised, curled in front of him.  Palms bleeding and thin.  Wires poking dirty red holes from his wrist.  Crumbling, crumbling.  He tore apart the box, piece by wretched piece.  

“No, no, no,  no !”

Shattered metal, plastic attached to it, redgreenblueblack, wire and wires and wire and wires.  He ripped it to shreds, vision white and consuming.  The green text scrolled.  Erik did not listen.

Then, it was over.  The box lay in pieces at his feet, and Erik turned away from it to rest his hands on Charles’ container.  No breath to lose, but still his lungs worked, metal guts screeching and clacking against each other inside of his ribcage.  

He dropped to his knees.

“No,” he said, almost as an afterthought, as his hands slid to rest on the floor beside him.  Calm.  “No.”

He saw it there, nestled between two metal slats.  Underneath a blinking light.  Small, and unobtrusive.

A tiny socket.  

Without another thought, Erik whipped back to the computer.  Shaking, he raised a hand.  Dragged piece by piece away, eyes searching desperately for something,  anything , that would fit the socket.  

( Something.   It had to be there.)

There.  There!  A green card, rectangular and patterned.  Erik reached for it without his power, gathering it hurriedly in the crook of his pointer finger and his thumb.  

Carefully, gingerly, he pushed the card into the socket.

Stood, heart slamming greasily into his ribs. 

And was greeted with nothing.

40.

But then.

 

41.

 

But  then.

 

42.

 

A crash.  A thump.  A gasp of breath.  The door of the container shivering, pulsing, knocking on it’s hinges.

Erik dragged the door away with one clenched fist.  

 

43.

But then–

“Erik?” 

(He breathed, sharply, with borrowed and useless air).

Charles stumbled from the container.  His hair was mashed to one side, skin terrible white and cracked, like he had spent decades lost at foggy sea.  But he was  there , leaning awkwardly on the edge of the container with one hand on his temple and the other stretched blindly forward.  

“Erik?  Are you there?”

And Erik, grinning, reached out to take his hand.  The cold of it barely reached his shattered nerves.    


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Decided to add another chapter because this doesn't really wrap it up like I wanted. So, epilogue coming soon.  
> Sorry for the wait!   
> Also: I'm terrible at writing "scientifically accurate". Oh dear.  
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
